Who: Terezi Pyrope, Karkat VantasWhen: Wednesday afternoonWhere: HallwaysSummary: No faciliberry, no idea what's going on. Terezi gets back from her trip back home, only to run into the last person she expected to be here.Rating: PG-13?Warnings: Trolls, idek.

Terezi was shaken. There wasn't really any other way to describe the tumultuous emotions racing through her head. There were so many things wrong with her trip back home--if she could even call it that. Who could tell if she had actually gone anywhere at all? Maybe the Consortium was screwing with her head again, planting memories and things that had no place being where they were. There were still human memories that cropped up once in a while that she knew were fabricated and tried to ignore, but this... This coincided with what everyone else had told her so far... And then some. Oh, and then some.

When she cautiously exited her suite, Terezi was still trying to shove that part back into the deep recesses of her mind. She could deal with it later. She needed to deal with it later because right now she had to go find her communication device. Time didn't wait around in this place, and she had to catch up on what was going on. Who knew how much time she had missed. So, still garbed in her FLARP outfit, Terezi made her way down the hall, cane in hand and only one goal in mind.

It'd been a terrible week thus far, and it was setting up Karkat with some seriously negative expectations from the get go. He'd been ready to give up already, but it was so much harder with Sollux obsessively camping out in his respiteblock, and admittedly not as desirable as it had seemed anymore.

Not with the way Sollux kept talking to him. He didn't understand what exactly was different, but the gap was looking increasingly more glaring.

Regardless, he'd chosen to ditch his friend for the moment, because he honestly needed some more time alone to think. What he wasn't expecting was to get his first visual confirmation of Terezi's presence.

"Fuck," he breathed, eyes going wide. He was stunned for a second or two, and then shouted at her down the hallway. "Hey! Terezi!"

Terezi halted immediately at the sound of that voice, her fist clenching tightly around her cane. For a split second, she almost started laughing--because if she was having hallucinations on top of dealing with these shitty new memories, so help her there would be blood...

But, no. She turned slowly and a bit hesitantly towards the voice, sniffing in the direction it had come from. It wasn't a hallucination, not as far as she could tell, which was probably the whole idea of what a hallucination was supposed to be. But that was circular logic that she did not give one iota of a fuck about.

"Hey," she called back, not nearly as enthusiastic as she wanted it to sound. Two parts nervous and one part hopeful, she changed her course and headed down the hallway that he was in. She wasn't quite running, but she was walking quickly to close the distance.

There was a plethora of questions that she wanted to ask when she finally came to a stop. 'Are you okay?' 'When are you from?' 'Do you remember being here?'... "When did you get here?" was the first one she could find the words for.

He moved forward a few steps as well as she came to him, at a loss for words. His mouth was open as she approached like he was about to answer her question usefully - only to get distracted as he apparently just noticed her outfit.

"I...what the fuck are you wearing?" he asked, looking down at the costume instead of her face.

...Okay, that was an entirely valid question that answered absolutely none of her current questions. It was actually a little embarrassing, why did he have to care about what she was wearing? Couldn't he just answer the question?

"It's a FLARP thing." And that should be all the explanation that Karkat needed. If it wasn't, he was going to have to wait. Terezi crossed her arms over her chest, cane dangling from one hand. "Are you going to answer my question or not?"

"Out gallivanting around the Veil and generally having a horrific time. It was like a party, except completely the opposite. I just came back."

Which meant that her head was hurting and she felt groggy and everything smelled a little more blurry than it usually did, but she was on her feet and trucking along anyway. Like the troll Energizer bunny.

"If I was even gone to begin with--which is entirely possible! Whatever. Are we wrapping up the pointless question brigade? Any more you want to get out of your system?"

Karkat suddenly felt terribly deceptive for not having already spelled out how little he knew to her, but at the same time he didn't really know how to put it. But he had no idea what she was referring to in terms of the Veil, and there was a chance some of that lack of comprehension was showing on his face.

"Well, you sure as fuck weren't here. Sollux was spinning some shit about how he didn't know where you were this whole time. How the hell can you actually managed to lose people here, it is not that big."

He paused, and then: "There, that's my pointless question. How are people here so incompetent."

It wasn't just the lack of comprehension to the word Veil the tipped her off. He should have know where she was. Anyone who had been in this place more than a month knew about subjects going comatose and coming back, how they disappeared and reappeared later. He wouldn't be asking why no one could find her.

Terezi's brow furrowed a bit, a frown inching across her lips. She ignored his question completely in favor of her own. "...You don't remember anything about this place, do you?"

That caught him completely off guard. He wasn't sure what had given him away, but his shoulders slumped slightly as she inevitably clued into the fact that he was the wrong guy. He didn't even know why he cared about hiding it. It's not like it was something he could pretend about forever.

"No," he said, unable to actually put much bark into it. "I don't. The torture station is kind of a new thing to me."

It stung, the disappointment of hearing those words. She couldn't say that it didn't. Maybe if she hadn't been hoping so hard for something that she knew wasn't going to happen a second time... Maybe it wouldn't have hurt so bad. But she had, and it did, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Terezi unfolded her arms, one hand coming up to rest against her temple. Maybe she had a headache (she did), or maybe she was trying to figure out what to say (she was), but mostly... She was just trying not to cry. Not like this, and not in front of Karkat. She could smell the way he had slumped during that admission, and he didn't need that. Neither of them needed that.

"What do you remember?" she finally asked after a long pause, her tone quieter this time to match Karkat's. She was a pro at this by now. She could handle this.

He furrowed his brow and looked up at her while she hesitated, briefly just taking in her appearance. He'd seen her before in pictures and the like, but he was only realizing now that this was actually the first time they'd met in person. It was surreal. And also pretty fucking awkward considering he was sure that sentiment was one sided.

Though he still hesitated for a long moment about sharing the next part.

"Basically...basically a fuck ton of nothing useful. None of that game crap, or the meteors, or...or whatever the hell happened in your strung out timeline." He glared furiously at the floor. "So according to Vriska I am apparently the most useless version of me you've ever had the displeasure of having here, so I guess. Just. Keep in mind that I have no fucking clue about anything you people are ever talking about."

"You're not useless." It was a knee-jerk response, but Terezi didn't care. It was the best response that she could come up with while her brain was still processing the fact that Karkat hadn't even entered the game yet. Jegus, what the hell was the Consortium doing? He really, really didn't know anything. About anything. Important or otherwise.

"But I'll keep that in mind. Just don't get comfortable with your handicap. You should keep in mind that we're all expecting you to catch up eventually." It wasn't a demand so much as a heads-up. Karkat was still their leader, even if he didn't know it yet, and that was something he was going to have to deal with. It a deeper commitment than just following his orders. He was the symbol of leadership itself. No one else would be able to hold them together like he could.

Karkat looked up, kind of surprised. Honestly, from GC...he'd been expecting more mockery. Or something. Honestly, something felt kind of off about their interactions here, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what.

"...Yeah, well." He made a confused kind of grimace. "I'll get right on that as soon as the cranial fluids stop dripping out of my aural clots. Seriously, this place is fucked up."

Terezi wasn't sure if she minded the surprise or not. It wasn't just being that far in the past. There were things that had happened here in this facility that Karkat had never experienced. She had a human year on him. A whole year. That was half of a sweep, which wasn't easy to just brush aside and ignore.

Still, she grinned a little at Karkat's assessment of their prison. "You have no idea. It's not like I know what's going on, but this sounds like one of the calmer weeks. You can tell because there's no screaming yet." Haha. Ha. Oh, if only she was joking.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and started looking apprehensive at the mention of the experiment. He'd almost forgotten that he'd basically decided he wasn't going to follow another one no matter the cost, but confronting that reality was consistently awful.

"Robo bitch is telling people what to do, and if you don't listen she murders you, basically. Some idiots on the network died that way already. Filmed it all, too, the exhibitionist fucks."

He was trying to cover it up by sounding scathing, but it was obvious to anyone who knew him that he was deeply unsettled but trying to pretend - to her and himself - that he wasn't.

"Hmm." Terezi doesn't sound at all surprised by the explanation of the experiment, despite the subtle frown gracing her lips again. Then again, why should she? There have been worse weeks. Much much worse weeks. She set the tip of her cane on the ground again, leaning against the top of it.

"What did she ask them to do? Was it something dumb? There's not a whole lot of things in this place worth dying for, but somehow people still find pretty dumb reasons for it..." Like pride, maybe? If it seemed like Terezi was giving him a pointed stare, Karkat was probably imagining it. She was blind, remember?

"Fuck if I know. Something to do with hurting people or something melodramatic like that. Most of it is just forces people to say embarrassing shit on the network. It's just a giant sack of alien shameglobes out there, it's like impossible to take seriously anymore."

Pssshhh pride. What pride? Who would do something as stupid as dying out of pride? This guy.